Exte: Hair Extensions



When the body of an unknown woman is found in a dockyard shipping container stuffed to the brim with human hair, the police are absolutely baffled as to her identity or why she was shoved into the container with a ton of hair. And they’re even more baffled as to why her body is also stuffed with hair, and that said hair appears to still be growing, despite her being dead. The coroner’s assistant, however, is absolutely delighted. He has an obsession with hair, so to find a body that keeps on growing and growing and growing hair is basically a dream come true to him. Plus, he’s been stealing the hair of select mortuary “visitors” and selling it to various salons for years, so this also conveniently fits into his business practice. So he surreptitiously steals the body and begins grooming his new prized possession, taking the clippings and giving samples away to various hair salons. Except of course our dead lady isn’t actually dead dead. Turns out she’s just mostly dead and very pissed off, and she happens to be really attached to her hair. So naturally that means that the feisty follicles become possessed and start killing people who have the unfortunate luck of coming into contact with her hair.

Meanwhile, a salon trainee by the name of Yuko is juggling work and taking care of her niece, since she’s discovered that her useless half-sister is also a child abusing ass-hat, while also studying for a test at the salon she works at. Luckily though, some generous, but weird man has just given the salon some nice free hair extensions samples that she can use to practice with….


“Please use the hair from my new, dead girlfriend on your clients!” – this dude…probably.

Just in case anyone got confused by all that up there, this is a movie about killer hair. Yes, you read that right: KILLER HAIR. Which is basically the sole reason I decided to watch it. Because why the hell wouldn’t you want to watch a movie about killer hair? A premise like that is just too delightfully weird to ignore. Kinda like that killer bulldozer movie. Or the one about the murderous rubber tire. You gotta watch shit like that at least once. Besides, Japan’s horror fare is usually delightfully offbeat, so if they offer me a movie about killer hair, of course I’m going to watch it, just to see what the hell they were thinking. But of course, like a lot of horror movies nowadays, the killer hair aspect isn’t actually the main focus of the film, and it’s forced to take a backseat to the film’s real horror: human drama! Um..yay?


Yeah, everyone looks THRILLED.

So, for the first half of the film, the movie’s plot is really split into two separate subplots. The first part follows the creepy hair guy as he comes across and steals the girl of his dreams, slowly spreading her curse throughout the land by giving away her hair all willy-nilly. And the second part follows Yuko while she and her roommate try to take care of a…what is that kid? Six years old? AND deal with Yuko’s bitch of a sister, cause she’s a thieving, abusive lunatic. Primarily though, the first part focuses more on the Yuko side of things, so expect to see a lot of hijinks, hair cutting, family DRAMA!, and scenes involving what is clearly a severely abused child trying not to get abused anymore. There is a bit of hair madness interspersed in there too, (thankfully) so it’s not too depressing. Seriously, if they’d cut out the killer hair parts from the first half entirely, you’d think you were watching the beginning of a very dreary urban drama. And since the move is 2 hours long, this all goes on for close to an hour, so be prepared for that. BUT! somewhere around the halfway point the two plots finally merge, and the resulting chaos is, as predicted, exquisitely weird. Hair starts possessing people and coming out of body parts it shouldn’t come out of, it strangles people, pulls them up into the air, elongates their tongue (still not sure how that one works…), fills entire rooms, and gives certain people uncomfortable flashbacks of organ harvesting during the Christmas season so that the audience has a little bit of backstory to work with regarding our “dead” girl. In a way, I guess the movie is trying to spoof the “long haired ghost” sub-genre of Japanese films by making the creepy long hair the actual star of the show. And they do a relatively good job of making said hair a surprisingly versatile little killing machine, even though it’s clear by the film’s offbeat tone and random references (the salon Yuko works at is named after a French serial killer) that the filmmakers are having fun and not taking the movie  seriously in any way (except when it comes to the child abuse…). So it ends up being kinda creepy and a delight to watch, even if only to see how anyone could make something so benign and mundane as hair potentially cause so much mayhem.



Thankfully with all the weirdness going on, the acting and cinematography hold up really well. Considering how…er…unconventional many of the characters are, everyone did an amazing job. No one is annoying (unless they’re strictly meant to be) and everyone is surprisingly likable, even the creepy obsessed hair guy, who may be one of the most eccentric little dudes you’re likely to ever come across. You keep expecting the ghost to off this nutter for running off with her corpse and all, but it becomes pretty obvious that this absolute wacko is probably treating her better than most people ever did in her life and that’s…really sad, actually. And Ren Ohsugi does a wonderful job of portraying the duality of this happy-go-lucky guy, who also just happens to be a huge creepy creeper. So, it should probably go without saying, expect some weirdness.



The one big downside is that some of the effects they used are kinda… iffy. Now, the practical effects? Gorgeous. Amazing. Often disturbing. The way they managed to show hair flowing out of fingertips or over eyes is definitely unsettling, but very well done and excellently implemented. But they also used a bit of CGI in there too and it’s, well, not nearly as good. I mean, it’s pretty good considering the time period the movie was made in I suppose, but it still stands out and oftentimes doesn’t flow all that well with most of the practical effects. Again, not all of the time, but just some of the time. But, they also used the CGI pretty sparingly in general, so you don’t have to put up with the more egregious moments too often. So it’s kinda one of those cases where you just gotta take the bad with the good.







So as I predicted, Exte ended up being gloriously strange. Maybe not OUT THERE out there, but still pretty odd. And still grounded enough to not reach the levels of some of the really weird crap I know Japan is known to occasionally produce (except for maybe that one scene at the end). Even the asshole ghost they went with here wasn’t as much of an asshole as most Japanese ghosts tend to be (They’re the assholes of the spiritual realm! I’m still convinced!) Because while she still killed all the other hair extension users freely and without remorse, she refrained from killing the kid when she got clipped with a hair extension. You know your background is tragic when the vengeful, perpetually pissed off “I’ll kill anything that touches my hair” ghost takes pity on you. (That or the filmmakers knew that killing off the abused kid who had the only serious backstory in the whole film was perhaps a step too far.) Regardless, not killing the kid keeps the movie from turning into the downer it easily could have been, had they went full-on asshole ghost, and for that, I thank them. And I also thank them for the spiffy looking practical effects, cause some of those things were gnarly. The pacing however, could have used a little more work as it does drag a bit in the first half. But other than that, this was a pretty fun little film. So if you like your horror a little bit weird, then give this one a go. But if you’re looking for something more serious, then I’m afraid you may have a few reservations with the “killer hair” movie.

Exte: Hair Extensions is available on a variety of streaming services (including subbed AND dubbed.)

Exte: Hair Extensions is also available on DVD and Bluray (in certain territories).

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